I'll try to come up with reasonable answers, although I'll be first to say that certain elements of what you're asking about were black-boxed, to be developed later if the larger-scale issues worked out OK.

As for art, I did commission some, but never received it. Too bad. I loves my skulls & buckles, and I still have very clear mental images of what my player-characters for the game would look like.

Whew! I can answer this. It should be the attacking character's goal, with the implication that one is motivated primarily by that goal and trying to get through the other character to do it.

On the other hand, now that you've mentioned that it could be the defending character's goal, my mind says, "Hey, that could work," but I am suppressing the impulse. The attacking character uses his or her own goal target number as his or her own target number when attacking another player-character.

Darn. I liked it better the other way.

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As a final point, I always thought of this as a six-to-eight person game, in order for seating to matter and for multiple simultaneous resolution to be a really shattering series of events. I don't really think of it as working with only three or four people total. However, I don't have any real experience in judging this assumption. How many people do you think you'll have?

Well, right now we've got four total. We may pull in a couple more, but I don't see us getting up to eight people. I see seating as mattering mostly at the point where the Black Pool dwindles. This will happen faster in a larger game, but I think the punch would still be there. Especially since Twisting the Knife hurts everybody equally. Am I missing something?

I think I know why I set up the target numbers for player-player combat the way I did. The Goals are a big deal, in the game, and relative to winning. I wanted to reward striving for them, and making people think twice about getting in the way of characters who have them. Otherwise, the winning tactic would be to hang back and not state Goals, then Vow to stop people who have them. But if the Goal target number is high, then look out - that guy is going to be hard to stop.